Today, we would like to talk about the next AMX Mod X version, what is happening, and what our future plans are.

What was taking so long?

As you may already understand, AMXX as a project is past its prime. Not many people are actively working on the code base, a direct result of reduced interest in the project specifically and GoldSrc games in general. Since we moved the project to GitHub, development has become quite a bit more active, but the pace is ultimately still slow. Our primary goal still is to once again provide an up-to-date release, including many bug fixes and long-awaited features.

Due to the waning interest in the games it supports, it is only natural that contributors would dip in and out of active development. So without a core team available to push through issues and keep the project on track, the contributions became a bit chaotic from a scheduling perspective.

My mistake as a maintainer was not setting clear targets that could be achieved with the limited time that both our contributors and I could put into the project. This meant that the number of changes got larger and larger as time passed (and oh how quickly it passes). I failed to get help from the community to process and test new changes and failed to tighten the scope of what we could ultimately deliver as an official release.

However, please keep in mind that all of the contributors are volunteers, and we can't force anybody to devote more time to AMXX than they are comfortable with.

Where we are now

As of 1.9, we have put the development version of AMXX into a feature-frozen state. This means that no new functionality and improvements will be accepted into what is going to eventually be the next release of AMX Mod X. Development will now focus on bug fixes and our time spent preparing for the next release.

We know that we still have a few exciting improvements and even the odd new feature in the pipelines, but we have to make a commitment to a release at some point. Once we have wrapped up the past couple of years into an official release, it will be much easier for our small team to get new stuff into the hands of users.

What is new?

AMX Mod X has had numerous fixes and improvements across all facets of the project:

As outlined above, this release has gotten pretty large, and we somewhat neglected including the community in the development. We are in sore need of more people that are willing to test and verify the new version.

As usual, AMXX should retain full backward compatibility, so if existing functionality breaks after upgrading, file a bug report.

How to report bugs or request features?

We've decided to complete our switch to GitHub and use their integrated issue tracker for all future bug reports and feature requests.

While this will require you to create a GitHub account to get in touch with contributors, we hope that it provides us with similar benefits as moving our code there. Having everything in one place for development should be more intuitive and get more eyes on the project. Also, quite frankly, the old issue tracker was barely used and still contains numerous outdated tickets that might not have been relevant for years.

The old tracker will still be publicly available, but new AMXX tickets will no longer be accepted.

The forum will remain the place for general support, help, and discussion.

The Future

First, starting from the next AMX Mod X release we will follow SourceMod in switching to a rolling-release cycle. We will provide more information at a later date, but this essentially means that we will be able to provide you with more frequent stable releases. It is simply not feasible for a mature project like AMXX to focus on big iterative releases that take years to come together.

Secondly, future changes will be focused on user-related issues, such as new/improved tools for managing servers and customization. This has been the primary area we have left out of this planned release, mostly because of missing time, but also because we needed to get the internals right before we can improve our user-facing tools.

Finally, we will try to get the community involved more. Even though we aren't nearly as many as we used to be, people still care about the project. We would like to thank every one of you for that.

Today, we would like to talk about the next AMX Mod X version, what is happening, and what our future plans are.

What was taking so long?

As you may already understand, AMXX as a project is past its prime. Not many people are actively working on the code base, a direct result of reduced interest in the project specifically and GoldSrc games in general. Since we moved the project to GitHub, development has become quite a bit more active, but the pace is ultimately still slow. Our primary goal still is to once again provide an up-to-date release, including many bug fixes and long-awaited features.

Due to the waning interest in the games it supports, it is only natural that contributors would dip in and out of active development. So without a core team available to push through issues and keep the project on track, the contributions became a bit chaotic from a scheduling perspective.

My mistake as a maintainer was not setting clear targets that could be achieved with the limited time that both our contributors and I could put into the project. This meant that the number of changes got larger and larger as time passed (and oh how quickly it passes). I failed to get help from the community to process and test new changes and failed to tighten the scope of what we could ultimately deliver as an official release.

However, please keep in mind that all of the contributors are volunteers, and we can't force anybody to devote more time to AMXX than they are comfortable with.

Where we are now

As of 1.9, we have put the development version of AMXX into a feature-frozen state. This means that no new functionality and improvements will be accepted into what is going to eventually be the next release of AMX Mod X. Development will now focus on bug fixes and our time spent preparing for the next release.

We know that we still have a few exciting improvements and even the odd new feature in the pipelines, but we have to make a commitment to a release at some point. Once we have wrapped up the past couple of years into an official release, it will be much easier for our small team to get new stuff into the hands of users.

What is new?

AMX Mod X has had numerous fixes and improvements across all facets of the project:

As outlined above, this release has gotten pretty large, and we somewhat neglected including the community in the development. We are in sore need of more people that are willing to test and verify the new version.

As usual, AMXX should retain full backward compatibility, so if existing functionality breaks after upgrading, file a bug report.

How to report bugs or request features?

We've decided to complete our switch to GitHub and use their integrated issue tracker for all future bug reports and feature requests.

While this will require you to create a GitHub account to get in touch with contributors, we hope that it provides us with similar benefits as moving our code there. Having everything in one place for development should be more intuitive and get more eyes on the project. Also, quite frankly, the old issue tracker was barely used and still contains numerous outdated tickets that might not have been relevant for years.

The old tracker will still be publicly available, but new AMXX tickets will no longer be accepted.

The forum will remain the place for general support, help, and discussion.

The Future

First, starting from the next AMX Mod X release we will follow SourceMod in switching to a rolling-release cycle. We will provide more information at a later date, but this essentially means that we will be able to provide you with more frequent stable releases. It is simply not feasible for a mature project like AMXX to focus on big iterative releases that take years to come together.

Secondly, future changes will be focused on user-related issues, such as new/improved tools for managing servers and customization. This has been the primary area we have left out of this planned release, mostly because of missing time, but also because we needed to get the internals right before we can improve our user-facing tools.

Finally, we will try to get the community involved more. Even though we aren't nearly as many as we used to be, people still care about the project. We would like to thank every one of you for that.

What about AMXX v2.0 , will the new SourceMod (SourcePawn) syntax be added to AMXX ? That would be amazing. Also, porting the KeyValue read format would also be a good idea, not the SMC since it was already ported, but the other, more easier to understand 1 from SourceMod (https://wiki.alliedmods.net/KeyValue...eMod_Scripting)), and the addition of Handle so when u make a handle variable you'd have to add Handle before it, just like you would add Float: in the current AMXX version before a floating point variable. That would be amazing from my point of view.

You have tools for the INI, SMC and lately JSON formats. I'm pretty sure you can do things with one of them.

Yeah, but SMC is more complicated to use than KeyValues and it's not that used in SM, many ppl prefer using KeyValues. SMC takes extra parameters and uses forwards from what I have seen in the example. And reading a normal ini is not the best idea when u want to easely set multiple keys with values and remove them. KV remains the best.

Actually, the tools for INI and SMC format are just to parse and read information from the file. It's event-based and it makes sense for them.

What about the JSON module? You can parse, create/modify or traverse a JSON input. For basic key-value, the format is similar. you should be able to do the same as KeyValues, give a try?

I have never user JSON so I'm not used to it. I used KeyValues alot on my SM plug-ins so I'm more used to them. But perhaps a good SMC tutorial can be made since there is just 1 for SM but things are not well explained and I haven't seen many SM plug-ins using it, only a few, one of them being the built-in SM admin plug-in. If someone makes a decent tutorial then most likely more people will get used to it. For stuff like arrays, tries etc there's not rly a need of a tutorial except maybe for iter and snapshot, because they are logical if you look at the inc files but it's still good that tutorials for them were made especially for people that are new to AMXX.